MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
With the help of the company’s Twin Frozr V cooler, MSI takes Nvidia’s already impressive GTX 980 Ti and pushes it beyond (yes, beyond) Titan-level performance. The open-air design means your chassis fans will have to move the heat out of your case, but this is the best single-chip card we’ve tested yet for 4K gaming. Read More…

MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

[Editors' Note: Be aware that pricing and features for video cards based on a given graphics chip can vary significantly, depending on the actual card maker. AMD and Nvidia make video "reference cards" based on their graphics processors, which they often send out for review. Third-party partners—MSI, Sapphire, EVGA, Asus, and many others—make and sell cards that often adhere closely to the design of these reference boards, as well as versions with slight differences in port configuration, the amount and speed of onboard memory, and the cooling fans or heat sinks installed. Be sure the specs and ports/connections on any "partner" board you're looking at are the same as what we've reviewed before making the purchase.]

Oh, how the Titan has tumbled! A mere four months ago, back in March of 2015, Nvidia debuted the GeForce GTX Titan X, an impressive beast of a video card. It delivered performance that, at the time, validated its $1,000 price tag—at least for gamers craving smooth performance at 4K resolutions.

Since then, though, the Titan has been attacked on two fronts. AMD finally delivered a new flagship card, the Radeon R9 Fury X, that—with the help of a new kind of graphics memory and some neatly executed liquid cooling—gets fairly close to the Titan X’s performance level at a more reasonable asking price (around $650).

Likely in anticipation of the R9 Fury X, Nvidia offered up its own potentially Titan-killing card, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. For the same $650 price, the stock GeForce GTX 980 Ti very nearly tied the GeForce Titan X, while using less power than AMD’s competing R9 Fury X, and avoiding the need for an installation-complicating liquid-cooling loop.

The stock GeForce GTX 980 Ti was impressive on its own. But the subject of our review here today, MSI’s GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G, is the first custom-cooled and overclocked version we've seen of Nvidia’s latest consumer-focused flagship card. Aside from the fact that it ditches the stock blower-style cooler (which pushes warm air out the back edge of the card and out of your PC's chassis) for an open-air chiller (MSI's familiar Twin Frozr V) that pushes air over the GPU and into the case, there’s little not to like.

With an out-of-the-box GPU overclock of nearly 18 percent (1,178MHz, versus the 1,000MHz on the stock version of the card), MSI’s GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G consistently outpaces the GeForce GTX Titan X, delivering noticeably higher frame rates on nearly all of our benchmark tests—even at the highest resolutions, where you might think the Titan card’s 12GB of memory would give it an edge.

At its current price of about $670, the overclocked MSI card is about $20 more expensive than the stock version. But if you’re looking to eke out the best frame rates at the highest resolutions, it’s well worth paying a little extra for if you're considering a GTX 980 Ti card. Just make sure your chassis fans are up to the job of pumping the card’s heat out of the case. Those with very small cases or systems crammed with hardware and few options for good ventilation may want to stick to the stock version of the card, as the blower-type cooler should do a better job of dissipating heat on its own.

Design

Rather than being a beefed-up version of the GeForce GTX 980, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is basically a slightly stripped-down version of the GeForce GTX Titan X—and the emphasis there is on slightly. The card is built around the same GM200 graphics chip as the GeForce GTX Titan X, the company’s most-powerful Maxwell-architecture chip with one GPU. But instead of the 3,072 CUDA cores and 192 texture units with the Titan X, you get 2,816 and 176 with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, respectively.

The clock speed of the stock GTX 980 Ti is the same as that of the GeForce GTX Titan X, with a 1,000MHz base clock rate that can boost up to a 1,075MHz rate when conditions demand and thermals allow. But with the Gaming 6G model of the GTX 980 Ti, MSI has pushed the base clock speed up about 18 percent, to 1,178MHz. And the top boost clock is bumped up to an even more impressive 1,279MHz—nearly 19 percent higher than the stock card.

Rather than rattle off a full list of the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G’s specs, here’s a chart of the salient ones, direct from MSI…

Forgoing the straight-through, blower-style cooler that Nvidia has been shipping with its stock cards for the past few years, MSI chose instead to opt for its dual-fan Twin Frozr V setup with the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G. We’ve seen this cooler on a few other cards recently, including the GTX 960 Gaming 2G, and most recently the AMD-based MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G. While those lesser cards have lower power demands and heat output than the GTX 980 Ti’s 250-watt TDP, we didn’t notice the cooler on this card getting annoyingly noisy, despite the fact that MSI has aggressively overclocked the card. The Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler, no whirling demon itself, inside our testbed's case was louder.

Aesthetically, the Twin Frozr V sports a decidedly AMD-like black-and-red color scheme, and a pair of quiet “Torx” fans that are designed to push air down, over the four 8mm heat pipes that sit atop the GPU. MSI says it has also increased efficiency by reducing the length of the pipes, by routing them in an asymmetrical “SU” shape as shown here…

Like other cards that use the Frozr cooling setup, the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G also has the ability to spin down the two fans for quiet running when idle—a mode cheekily called "Zero Frozr." But considering this card’s higher power demands, we’d expect the fans to switch off less often here than with, say, the GTX 960 Gaming 2G.

MSI also includes a metal backplate that covers the rear side of this card—a feature that was surprisingly lacking in the stock version of the card that Nvidia sent for our original review. Considering the price of the card, we’re happy to see MSI include it here. The plate also features the company’s tribal dragon design, which is a nice touch for PC upgraders and builders who have a chassis with a side window. The card back is sometimes all you can see, depending on where you place your case, so good thinking there on MSI's part.

Port selection on the MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G is what we’d expect; just like with the stock 980 Ti, you get a dual-link DVI port, three DisplayPort connectors, and an HDMI 2.0 port, all full-size. This makes the card both more backwards-compatible and more future-looking than AMD’s R9 Fury X, which lacks both DVI and HDMI 2.0 ports.

Just like the stock version of the card, MSI’s GTX 980 Ti Gaming 4G is 10.5 inches long. But in order to deliver more power for overclocking, MSI has opted for two eight-pin power connectors, rather than the six- and eight-pin configuration on the stock card…

You may need some converters on your power-supply leads, but the 250-watt rated TDP means you could power an extreme gaming rig built around the GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G using only a 600-watt power supply. Opt for, say, the dual-GPU AMD Radeon R9 295X2 instead, and AMD recommends a whopping 1,500-watt power supply, from which the two eight-pin connectors should be able to deliver a combined 50 amps. The R9 Fury X, meanwhile, has a more modest power rating of 275 watts, but that’s still higher than the GTX 980 Ti, while delivering slightly lower performance.

Compared to the original GeForce GTX 980, Nvidia points out that the GTX 980 Ti sports 38 percent more CUDA cores and texture units. And, as we’ll see in testing, it’s definitely a substantial step up from the non-Ti version. But if you’re looking for absolutely no-compromise 4K gaming, you’re still going to want to spring for a second GeForce card in SLI, or opt for a dual-GPU option like AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2. But MSI's version here makes those extreme options a little less enticing.

Table of Contents

MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G

Our Verdict:
With the help of the company’s Twin Frozr V cooler, MSI takes Nvidia’s already impressive GTX 980 Ti and pushes it beyond (yes, beyond) Titan-level performance. The open-air design means your chassis fans will have to move the heat out of your case, but this is the best single-chip card we’ve tested yet for 4K gaming.

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